In a sense, the World Cup is the event best suited to counter today’s AI anxiety. Every four years, everyone from hardcore fans to those who never normally watch a match gathers around the TV or meets up in a bar to share in the emotionally charged atmosphere that large language models simply cannot replicate.

For football fans in China, watching this grand event requires no emotional investment in a home team. The men’s team once again failed to qualify for the World Cup finals. The only time it did qualify was 24 years ago. In the period since, it had ample time to nurture and develop football superstars. But it didn’t.

This fact often raises numerous questions. In a country with about 700 million men, why is it not possible to find 11 good players? And among football, basketball, and volleyball — collectively known as “the three major ball sports” in Chinese — why does it seem that football stars are the most difficult to find?

Conventional wisdom places the blame on the professional football system, youth development programs, or subpar managers and coaches. These factors all play a role in China’s football conundrum. But as a demographer, I see another answer — and perhaps a counterintuitive one.

Many people believe that a larger population means a wider talent pool to choose from, and therefore a higher quality of football. But it’s not just China. Other countries with large populations — including India, Indonesia, and the United States — have also been unable to consistently compete against top international sides. The lack of a strong footballing tradition like that found in South America can partly explain the issue. But what is the actual relationship between population size and football quality?

Zhao Yanjing, an urban economics professor at Xiamen University, has proposed what he calls the “scale curse” hypothesis. He observes that, in professional football, the typical population size of traditional powerhouses is between 50 million and 100 million. Footballing heavyweights in Europe, as well as Japan and South Korea in Asia, are all close to this range.

His interpretation is as follows: While having too few people often means there isn’t enough talent to choose from, having too many has its own drawbacks. The number of players that a country’s professional leagues can support, along with the share that those positions represent within the youth labor market, determines how attractive football is as a profession to ordinary people. As a result, as long as the total supply of professional football positions remains fixed, a huge population does not create a scale advantage. Instead, it actually reduces the incentive for ordinary people to pursue football.

Take China and England as examples. Both the Chinese Super League and the English Premier League have around 20 teams, which in turn shapes the scale of the lower divisions. Calculated this way, the total number of professional players that the two countries can accommodate will not differ much. However, there are approximately 20 times as many young people in China as in England.

As a result, the competitive pressure for youngsters in China who choose to pursue a football career will be much higher than in England. For ordinary Chinese families, the rational choice is to steer their children away from the dream of playing football professionally. This is the underlying logic behind the phenomenon known as “retirement at 12 years old,” the age at which youth football players go to middle school and no longer have time for both sports and keeping up with classwork.

The second mistake that people intuitively make is thinking that, because football draws from a broader talent pool than basketball or volleyball, it should be easier to identify world-class players. The first part is correct: Among the superstars, there is 1.7-meter-tall Lionel Messi and 1.95-meter-tall Zlatan Ibrahimović. However, it is precisely because football is so accepting in terms of body size that it makes it even more difficult to identify and select talent. By comparison, it takes little expertise to spot 2.29-meter-tall Yao Ming’s suitability for basketball.

The difficulty in scouting football players also lies in the fact that real match experience and teamwork skills need time to develop and evaluate. This is where football differs significantly from sports such as tennis, which rely primarily on individual skill. Usually, it is not possible to determine whether someone has the potential to become a star footballer before the age of 18. Football players can be trained, but stars can only emerge through a long period of competition. That, again, relies on a sufficiently large pool of teenage players that China still lacks.

In recent years, with the sudden rise of grassroots competitions like the Jiangsu Provincial City Football League, or Suchao, many fans have come to see such leagues as the way out for Chinese football, hoping they can expand the talent pool. It’s true that these leagues have produced new career opportunities for football professionals. However, they are essentially still amateur or semi-professional competitions, and it is difficult for them to cultivate star players. The dozens of new football positions created in each city are far from enough to address the mass “retirement” of 12-year-olds from the game.

And yet, grassroots leagues might change the future of Chinese football — but in a less obvious way.

Football fans in China have long joked that the national team’s poor fortune has allowed the country to equalize that fate with good fortune in its economic and technological development. Few people take this seriously, and yet it might contain a degree of truth. Prosperity has provided young people with a broader path for advancement and made study a much more cost-effective and predictable option than sports. In contrast, in many places where the economy is struggling and social class structures are entrenched, sports offer a rare path to upward mobility.

Does this mean China’s rise in football would have to come at the cost of slower social and economic development? And could the narrowing of upward paths and the “low-desire” lifestyle associated with young people nowadays be seen as positive signs for the national football team? The answer is no.

As China grows richer and people’s basic needs are fulfilled, experiences become more valuable. Increased focus on this demand will spur new forms of consumption, providing new development channels for youngsters and enabling China to move from a production-oriented society to one focused on quality of life, and from the world’s factory to the world’s market. This is why, over the past few years, China has prioritized supporting service-led consumption as a key measure to expand domestic demand.

Here, football can contribute. Grassroots leagues such as the Suchao are not simply contests. They also bring greater exposure to lesser-known cities, highlighting their local history, culture, and scenery, and driving consumption through tourism, transportation, and other services. More importantly, they inspire people to make football part of their lives.

Imagine if instead of attending extra classes after school, children enjoyed a kick-around, while adults might play a casual match on the weekend rather than working overtime. People might hire a coach to teach them new techniques and tactics, pay for a fitness trainer to learn how to recover better, pay an organization to put on football events, and travel to away games to support their favorite team. Meanwhile, players who fail to make it as professionals can become coaches or build careers in related areas.

Returning to AI, its continuous evolution may be accelerating the arrival of this day. AI’s capabilities offer an opportunity to reflect on what kinds of growth individuals need: is it the endless rat race of school exams, or the exploration of diverse interests and development paths?

China, which has now entered an era of negative population growth, has placed “high-quality population development” at the center of its population policies. But “high quality” here doesn’t mean everyone needs to become a computer scientist or engineer. Instead, it’s about stimulating people’s potential and enabling them to realize their unique value in appropriate careers — including the many football-related careers.

Then Chinese football will finally be on a path to World Cup glory.

Translator: David Ball; portrait artist: Wang Zhenhao.

(Header image: A child plays with a football-shaped balloon in Beijing, June 20,2026. Li Wenming/VCG)